Terry Eagleton quotes - page 2

Terry Eagleton is a British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual, recognized for his influential work in literary theory and cultural criticism. His writings explore topics such as Marxism, ideology, and the role of literature in society. He has authored many notable books that have shaped contemporary critical thought. Here are 127 of his quotes:

The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.

Terry Eagleton

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

Terry Eagleton

Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

Terry Eagleton

History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

Terry Eagleton

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Terry Eagleton

All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.

Terry Eagleton

Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.

Terry Eagleton

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Terry Eagleton

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.

Terry Eagleton

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

Terry Eagleton

I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U. S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller.

Terry Eagleton

It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged”, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

Terry Eagleton

The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.

Terry Eagleton

In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary' level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.

Terry Eagleton

The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Terry Eagleton

It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.

Terry Eagleton

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons-reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

Terry Eagleton

In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34.

Terry Eagleton

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Terry Eagleton

We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and irrational.

Terry Eagleton

Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.

Terry Eagleton

Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob.

Terry Eagleton